The Gulf of Ton-kin

By: Sean Napier

The Gulf of Ton-kin

By: Sean Napier

General info on the incident

It all started on August 2, 1964, For america that is. We had not been apart of the Vietnam war till this incident. The Maddox and Turner both reported being ambushed in the north sea right off the east coast of north Vietnam. The reported high speed torpedo's coming at them. They shot 3 warning shots however the torpedo's kept coming. They both reported 22 shots were fired at them. As for this L.B.J. decided to use this as leverage to start the war in Vietnam and sent us troops over. By 1965 about 180,000 U.S. soldiers were over in Vietnam on the south Vietnamese soil.

The Media

The media saw two sides to this incident. One side to this is they believed that the government was just using so they would have true reason to start the war in Vietnam. Some people tried to say this incident never happened as some reports said that the men of the ships never got fired at.

On the other end the media used this to monopoly the war cause and saying if the communist are willing to attack our ships they will be willing to do the same to our country. Using this to say we need to stop this before more men our attacked that are over there.

bias

The types of bias you seem to see constaintly pop up our that everyone one has a different side of the story or they all use different sources. you can never really tell which is true due to this or find out the whole story with out some white lies from people. Everyone who has these bias uses different sources to make there story look original and can make it big with there published article.

criticism

throught out all the storys in historical text it seems as if none of the storys match or have there own spin on it. Due to at the time there was no video cameras or social media or any pictures taken we can never truly find out what happened that day.

what people thought at first

The untied states average person thought it was a great idea to go to war due to the incident in tonkin. Americans have always been a very patriotic country and when soldiers get hurt it gets many men and women riled up. Aka making this war easy to start for LBJ.

My own opinion

once i started to look far into this incident it seems that the government never actually had this happen it was all a lie. Personally feel this whole incicdent never happened due to when the men on the ship were interviewed they all said there were no shots ever fired. So if this never really happened we went into a war over a lie by our own government. If this is true what else has the government lied about to start a war cover there butts and so on and so forth.